Evaluation of IDRC-supported eHealth projects : final report

This report provides an in-depth account of the evaluation findings and recommendations for the next five years of IDRC’s eHealth programming. The quantitative and qualitative assessment covered 25 projects representing activities in 25 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) of which approximately 50% have been completed and 50% remain on-going ranging in scope from $30,000 -$2,422,652. The total dollar value of the projects included in this evaluation is approximately $17 million CAD. To complement the evaluation a targeted literature review of eHealth, a series of Lessons Learned Workshops with grantees and IDRC staff, and key informant interviews with internal and external stakeholders were conducted..

Kuali OLE Project Update

The Kuali OLE version 0.8 release will be the first implementable release of Kuali OLE. This session will give an update to the project overall, and specific details as to the functionality included in version 0.8 and what is planned for 1.0. The presentation will include how Kuali OLE is using technologies, specifically Kuali Finance, Kuali Rice, and Apache Jackrabbit document repository, to deliver a complete environment for managing library collections and resources

Solution Deposition of Conformal Gold Coatings on Knitted Fabric for E-Textiles and Electroluminescent Clothing

The vision for wearable electronics involves creating an imperceptible boundary between humans and devices. Integrating electronic devices into clothing represents an important path to this vision; however, combining conductive materials with textiles is challenging due to the porous structure of knitted textiles. Stretchability depends on maintaining the void structure between the yarns of the fabric; filling these voids with conductive materials stiffens the textile and can lead to detrimental cracking. The authors demonstrate the solution-based metallization of a knitted textile that conformally coats individual fibers with gold, leaving the void structure intact. The resulting gold-coated textile is highly conductive, with a sheet resistance of 1.07 Wsq-1in the course direction. The resistance decreases by 80% when the fabric is stretched to 15% strain, and remains at this value to 160% strain. This outstanding combination of stretchability and conductivity is accompanied by durability to wearing, sweating, and washing. Low-cost screen printing of a wax resist is demonstrated to produce patterned gold textiles suitable for electrically connecting discrete devices in clothing. The fabrication of electroluminescent fabric by depositing layers of device materials onto the gold-coated textile is furthermore demonstrated, intimately merging device functionality with textiles for imperceptible wearable devices

The Effect of Attitudes and Emotions on the Desire to Use Arabic in Communication: Case Study of the Learners of Arabic as a Second Language at the Malysian University of Islamic Sciences

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of attitudes and emotions on the desire to use Arabic in communication in a second language learning context, in this case learners of Arabic as a second language at the Malaysian University of Islamic Sciences. A number of 225 students from the Islamic Science University of Malaysiavoluntarily participated in the study. The students represented four faculties of the University. A model of "willingness" to communicate in the second language was tested using Structural Equation Modeling and was found to accurately fit the data. The study found that language competence was antecedent of language communication confidence, while language confidence significantly and statistically correlated with willingness to communicate and consequently with language proficiency. The study also showed that male learners are more liable to language anxiety which was found to be negatively correlated with language competence and consequently lack of ability to use the target language. The study recommends that teachers provide learners of Arabic as a second language with greater opportunities to use the language inside and outside the classroom and to make their teaching more task-orientedinstead of lecture-oriented

Ready-to-wear strain sensing gloves for human motion sensing

Integrating soft sensors with wearable platforms is critical for sensor-based human augmentation, yet the fabrication of wearable sensors integrated into ready-to-wear platforms remains underdeveloped. Disposable gloves are an ideal substrate for wearable sensors that map hand-specific gestures. Here, we use solution-based metallization to prepare resistive sensing arrays directly on off-the-shelf nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) gloves. The NBR glove acts as the wearable platform while its surface roughness enhances the sensitivity of the overlying sensing array. The NBR sensors have a sheet resistance of 3.1 ± 0.6 Ω/sq and a large linear working range (two linear regions ≤70%). When stretched, the rough NBR substrate facilitates microcrack formation in the overlying metal, enabling high gauge factors (62 up to 40% strain, 246 from 45 - 70% strain) that are unprecedented for metal film sensors. We apply the sensing array to dynamically monitor gestures for gesture differentiation and robotic control

Protocol for fabricating electroless nickel immersion gold strain sensors on nitrile butadiene rubber gloves for wearable electronics

This protocol describes the fabrication of patterned conductive gold films on nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) gloves for wearable strain sensors using electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG) plating, a solution-based metallization technique. The resulting NBR/ENIG films are strain sensitive; resistance measurements of a patterned sensing array can be used to map human hand motions. This protocol also describes challenges related to the ENIG process and troubleshooting steps to achieve conformal gold films for strain sensing over a large working range. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Mechael et al. (2021)

Stakeholder Orientation, Managerial Discretion and Nexus Rents

A firm\u27s orientation toward its stakeholders determines how it will use the discretion accorded to it by external and internal circumstances. The interaction between these two factors affects a firm\u27s ability to create value in the short term and influences the level of discretion available to the firm in the long term. We argue that the interplay of discretion and orientation create a vicious (or virtuous) cycle, in which the firm either creates or destroys goodwill with stakeholders, thereby making it more or less likely that stakeholders will grant discretion in the future. This argument suggests an account of stakeholder management that is sensitive to variation in managerial discretion, an account that is more constrained than typical moral and instrumental prescriptions about how firms should treat stakeholders and less constrained than descriptions premised on more deterministic theories